Nowadays, different consumer electronic equipment are available at home. Some electronic equipment, such as digital TVs, set-top boxes, mobile phones, PDAs, DVD players, laptop computers, refrigerators, are provided with wireless communication modules thus forming an in-home wireless network system. In order to establish a secure communication among two or more wireless equipment, they are paired, e.g., each electronic equipment involved in the communication is paired to each other equipment before receiving or transmitting any message.
In accordance with a first known pairing solution, such electronic equipment share a common secret for securely communicating, e.g., they share a common secret key. This solution is, for example, adopted in the field of banking or satellite television. In fact, smart cards employed to manage financial transactions and the ones involved in pay-per view television services are usually provided with their own secret key to ensure a secure communication with other equipment provided with the same key.
In accordance with a second pairing solution, a third party is trusted as a certification authority. This solution is adopted, for example, to allow secure communications over the internet.
Whether both solutions above are not available, a further solution provides that a user can be considered as a secure third party in the authentication and pairing of electronic equipment. For example, such further solution is commonly used to perform pairing of wireless electronic equipment in accordance with a Bluetooth technology. In this case, as known by those skilled in the art, the Bluetooth equipment to be paired are put close one to the other in order to clearly exchange their public keys. The user has to check on a display of each of the two equipment/devices that a same reference number is correctly displayed, so as to ensure that nobody has modified the communication and the public keys have been exchanged correctly.
A drawback of Bluetooth pairing is that checking can be performed by the user only if the wireless equipment/devices are close to each other. However, this is not the case of an in-home wireless network system which usually comprises large electronic equipment, such as TVs, refrigerators or DVD players located in different rooms of the home.